Rent books on Amazon? Hmm.

As I work away on 3D printing I am looking at regulation literature. Ayres and Braithwaite’s Responsive Regulation is available on Amazon for 34.99 for Kindle or you can rent it starting at $14.73 (no kidding, it is that precise). There is a calendar and you can select the length of the rental (3 months comes out to $22.30 and to Amazon’s credit hover over a date and the price appears rather than having to click each date). On the one hand this offering seems rather nifty. Yet I wonder what arguments about market availability and fair use will be made with this sort of rental model for books in play. And this option brings us one step closer to perfect price discrimination. Would I see the same rental price as someone else? Would I need some research assistant to rent for me? Would that person’s price model be forever altered based on some brief period of working for a professor? What about librarians who rent books for work (I suppose work accounts would be differentiated but the overlap between interests may shift what that person sees on a personal account too). Perhaps Ayres and Braithwaite’s regulation pyramid is needed yet again.

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Deven Desai

Deven Desai is an associate professor of law and ethics at the Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology. He was also the first, and to date, only Academic Research Counsel at Google, Inc., and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and the Yale Law School.
Professor Desai’s scholarship examines how business interests, new technology, and economic theories shape privacy and intellectual property law and where those arguments explain productivity or where they fail to capture society’s interest in the free flow of information and development. His work has appeared in leading law reviews and journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, Minnesota Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, and U.C. Davis Law Review.